One of history’s most influential games of football happened in 1966.
It was the quarter-final between England and Argentina.
The referee was German, Rudolf Kreitlin, and he called a foul against Argentina.
The Argentine captain, Antoni Rattin, began yelling at the ref in Spanish.
The German referee didn’t speak Spanish and he wasn’t used to being shouted at, so he sent Rattin off.
But the Argentine didn’t understand, he didn’t speak German, so he refused to go.
He couldn’t express himself to the referee and the ref was upset that a player wouldn’t do what he was told.
The argument dragged on for eight minutes until the Argentine player was eventually forced to leave the field and the German referee resumed play.
The next day the newspapers covered the match and reported that both Jack and Bobby Charlton had also been booked.
This was news to the Charlton brothers, during the game no-one told them they were booked.
They called Fifa to clarify the situation and it turned out that Jack Charlton had been booked but Bobby Charlton hadn’t.
So the referee thought one thing, the players thought something else, and the press thought something completely different.
The World Cup was clearly a mess. How could you play top-level international football when the referees couldn’t make themselves understood?
English referee Ken Aston was in overall charge of all the referees for the World Cup and this was the problem he was faced with.
How to communicate clearly what was happening when everyone spoke different languages?
This was going through his mind as he drove along Kensington High Street.
As he approached a set of traffic lights, they turned yellow so he slowed down. When he got closer they turned red, so he stopped.
Then something in his brain went ‘ping’.
Everyone knows about traffic lights: YELLOW means “Be careful” and RED means “Stop”. That’s a language the whole world understands.
When he got home, he explained it to his wife. She straight away cut two pieces of card in red and yellow, just big enough to fit into his shirt pocket.
Now, without saying a word, any referee could pull out a red or yellow card and everyone watching (players, fans, journalists) would know exactly what was going on. Even without saying a word there couldn’t be any confusion.
YELLOW was a warning. RED meant you’re off.
That is real semiotics: communication without words.
And it works all over the world in every game of football played every day. And it didn’t take a department full of people with degrees to work it out.
All it took was someone thinking the way ordinary people think. That and about 30 seconds of common sense.
If we let ourselves think like ordinary people, like the people we’re supposed to be talking to, we can be that effective.
We know how to make ourselves understood without a focus group telling us what to say. Make it simple. Keep it short. Put it in a language that works for the people we’re talking to.
Humans have been using semiotics for 30,000 years.
That’s why Bill Bernbach said:
“Our proper area of study is simple, timeless, human truths.
It is insight into human nature that is the key to the communicator’s skill. For whereas the writer is concerned with what he puts into his writings, the communicator is concerned with what the reader gets out of it.”